Edit Role

Edit model role

It’s often useful to select a different model to respond to Edit instructions than for Chat instructions, as Edits are often more code-specific and may require less conversational readability.

In Continue, you can add edit to a model’s roles to specify that it can be used for Edit requests. If no edit models are specified, the selected chat model is used.

YAML

Use model roles.

config.yaml

models:
  - name: Claude 3.5 Sonnet
    provider: anthropic
    model: claude-3-5-sonnet-latest
    apiKey: <YOUR_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY>
    roles:
      - edit

Explore edit models in the hub. Generally, our recommendations for Edit overlap with recommendations for Chat.

Model Recommendations

Model role	Best open models	Best closed models	Notes
Chat Edit	Qwen3 Coder (480B) Qwen3 Coder (30B) gpt-oss (120B) gpt-oss (20B)	Claude Opus 4.1 Claude Sonnet 4 GPT-5 Gemini 2.5 Pro	Closed and open models have pretty similar performance

Prompt templating

You can customize the prompt template used for editing code by setting the promptTemplates.edit property in your model configuration. Continue uses Handlebars syntax for templating.

Available variables for the edit template:

• {{{userInput}}} - The user’s edit request/instruction
• {{{language}}} - The programming language of the code
• {{{codeToEdit}}} - The code that’s being edited
• {{{prefix}}} - Content before the edit area
• {{{suffix}}} - Content after the edit area
• {{{supportsCompletions}}} - Whether the model supports completions API
• {{{supportsPrefill}}} - Whether the model supports prefill capability

Example:

models:
  - name: My Custom Edit Template
    provider: openai
    model: gpt-4o
    promptTemplates:
      edit: |
        `Here is the code before editing:
        \`\`\`{{{language}}}
        {{{codeToEdit}}}
        \`\`\`

        Here is the edit requested:
        "{{{userInput}}}"

        Here is the code after editing:`